In a POS (Point of sale) terminal apparatus used in a supermarket and the like, commodities are put in front of a scanner one by one and commodity information is instantly read from, for example, a barcode to achieve a fast checkout processing.
In the conventional POS terminal apparatus, barcodes respectively attached on commodities are read by a dedicated scanner, thereby carrying out a checkout processing. However, since it is difficult to directly attach a barcode to perishable foods such as vegetables and fruits, thus, an operator selects and inputs candidates displayed on a cashier, which leads to a problem of low-efficient checkout.
In order to address such a problem, in recent years, a POS terminal apparatus using an object recognition technology is being developed which calculates feature amount of a commodity when an object is directly put in front of a scanner and compares the calculated feature amount with a pre-created dictionary file to recognize the object.
In this way, during an object recognition processing, a matching processing is carried out in all recognition dictionaries in sequence, thus causing a problem that the greater the size (the number of the registration commodities) of a comparison target dictionary is, the longer the time is taken.